I've come to realize that there's a fundamental point of misunderstanding between proponents of reproductive freedom and those who find themselves arguing on the other side. I keep running into it in diary after diary, wherever there is a debate going on about abortion. It's the number one thing that keeps the circular arguments going and going, like some rhetorical version of the Energizer Bunny.
So let's correct the misunderstanding right here, right now: Pro-choice advocates are not, repeat, not "unwilling to compromise." We are not "intractable" or "absolutist" or "trying to force our views on others." We are totally on board with compromising, so much so that we have already engaged in the biggest compromise possible in the reproductive rights arena.
That compromise is commonly referred to as Roe v. Wade.
Before the Roe decision, kindly remember that abortion was specifically illegal in most of the United States. A woman who found herself pregnant had two choices - have the baby (whether she wanted it or not, whether it would endanger her life or not) or become a criminal and have a dangerous, illegal abortion. In other words, a woman was considered to be subservient to her fertilized egg. An unborn entity, her fetus, was accorded all the rights and protections that everyone else who was already born and part of society was given... except for the pregnant woman.
What many people seem not to remember is that the Supreme Court did not endorse all the arguments made by the Roe team. What was actually being argued was that women are entitled to complete freedom and control over their own reproductive decisions. The court's decision did indeed grant that women were entitled to such freedom, but also imposed restrictions to safeguard rights for the fetus, as well. So in order to get our reproductive freedoms legally recognized at all, women had to accept the compromise of balancing our rights against those of the unborn.
I'll state it another way: the Roe decision acknowledged that women have rights to make decisions about whether to continue pregnancies, but imposed a few rules about timing and circumstances. So we went from the law treating pregnant women as a class of slaves (with no choice but to bear the child or risk death and/or prison by seeking an illegal abortion) to being treated as semi-free human beings, with some legal restrictions on the freedom that, incidentally, have no parallels for men. For women (and pro-choice advocates of any gender), Roe was only a partial victory. It was a victory, for sure, and one we celebrate and cherish, but it fell pretty far short of delivering everything reproductive rights advocates were shooting for.
That's why it is a compromise. We got some things we wanted, and anti-choice folks got some things they wanted.
If you're in any way on the anti-choice side of this conflict, this is why you are getting hostile responses when you condescendingly cluck about how "unwilling to compromise" we are and how we "won't listen to the other side's point of view" about whether our rights to reproductive freedom should be even further curtailed. We've already given up a lot of the freedom we were seeking, in exchange for finally having our rights recognized to some degree.
Got that? We already gave up things. What we want now is to keep what (comparatively) little we actually do have. You, on the other hand, are actively arguing for taking it away. And there are plenty of you who are perfectly willing to interfere - with verbal, psychological, and physical assaults - in our ability to exercise our legal rights.
I get that you are concerned about the rights of the fetus. I get that you are worried that we are depriving a human being of legal protections. What you don't seem to get is that women are human too, and that we who already exist as functional members of society should come first in terms of rights and protections.
We've accepted that, legally, our fetus will have rights that trump ours at certain points in our pregnancies. Why can't you accept that, too?